GeorgiaDon

This is another one of those destructive social trends I alluded to earlier, though I didn't discuss this one. My anecdotal observation, based on doing outreaches in elementary and middle schools, is that far too many young boys, especially (dare I say it) young Black boys (almost all of them, by middle school) see the NFL or NBA as their only career choice. It doesn't matter if they are complete runts or have coke bottle glasses, they all think they'll be the next Michael Jordan. Well, that or a rap singer. Unfortunately the parent (rarely parents) are all too supportive of this "plan", no doubt lured by the prospect of retiring on their kids multi-million-dollar-per-year paycheck. None of these kids seem to have a backup plan, such as a real job. If the NBA or NFL is your only focus, it makes sense to spend all your time playing basketball or football, and learning math or how to read can be considered a distraction you can't afford. Got to perfect that jump shot you know. By the time they get to high school, sports are so serious and competitive that every evening and weekend is spent in organized practice, not doing homework or working a part time job (which builds character and real world experience). By the time these kids figure out they are not going to be a professional athlete (generally when they do not get a university sports scholarship) they're so far behind academically they're locked into a low pay menial job (or crime) future. It pisses me off how universities play into this exploitation for their own profit. Sports are great for fun and for entertainment, but we've turned things on their head when football is seen as a preferable career choice over business, medicine, or any other "real" job. I have no idea how to reverse the trend, in a world where a few people make such outlandish salaries for playing a game. Working hard to master skills needed to have a career that pays a respectable living seems so boring compared to playing sports 24/7 for a 0.000001% chance at a multi-million-$$ payday. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Not so true. Our only choice on the jury was First Degree murder with UP TO 30 years, but not less than 10. Those were the Judge's instructions. Let me correct that. That was the only choice provided by the DA and we had to follow the Judge's instructions about what that meant. So true. Current Florida Supreme Court issued "Standard Jury Instructions" for homicide are linked here. Instructions provided to specific juries in specific trials are agreed to by the prosecution and defense in consultation with the judge. Perhaps you were not instructed about lesser included offenses for some reason, though I can't imagine why. However, if you did not convict on the first degree murder charge you should have been able to consider 2nd degree and on down. Are you saying that you were instructed that, if you found that the prosecution proved the defendant killed the victim, but did not prove premeditation, then you had to acquit and not discuss 2nd degree murder? Edited to add: The above was posted before I saw your correction to your post. My understanding* is that the DA does not have to list all the lesser included offenses. They are automatically included as a matter of law. The judges instructions should have covered this, it seems to me. *Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and do not claim to practice law in Florida or anywhere else. I am only able to use Google, to read English (even lawglish to a considerable extent), and I have a decent memory for generally useless trivia. Hopefully Andy, Lawrocket, or one of our other legal eagles will chime in to provide the definitive word. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Yes, I'm sure that's the case in Florida. I could link to some legal pdfs but they are very long (the Florida statutory "instructions to jurors" pdf is over 700 pages as it discusses all crimes, not just murder). Rather, I'll link to this article that discusses lesser included offenses with regard to the Zimmerman case, but is relevant to the Dunn case as it discusses Florida law specifically. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

The answer is yes, in fact that is just what is going to happen. He could get 20 years for each attempted murder conviction, plus 15 years on the firearm charge. In theory the sentences could be consecutive, which would keep him locked up essentially for life. In Florida, is it the judge or the jury who decides on the sentence? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Am I a bad person if I think this is kind of funny? I mean, it's unfortunate that the guy died but how ironic can you get? Fundie religion 0: Reality 1 Reality show snake-handling preacher dies -- of snakebite Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Part of the problem is also that it doesn't matter if you win the argument, as that is not the point of the exercise from the creationist side. The point they really want to make is that there is a scientific debate on the topic at all, because that feeds their "teach the controversy" strategy to get Genesis included as a science textbook in schools. From that perspective they win as long as anybody agrees to debate them. Of course, creationist arguments are vacuous and easily rebutted, but at the end of the day none of Ham's followers would be convinced by anything Nye could possibly bring to the table, and vice versa. Unfortunately this sets up a "when did you stop beating your wife" no-correct-answer situation. If Nye debates Ham, that validates the "controvery" and Hamm wins. If Nye declines, it must be because he can't answer Ham's "brilliant science", and Ham wins. These heads-I-win, tails-you-lose strategies may suit lawyers and politicians (I think Ham is a lawyer by training), but they aren't natural to scientists whose own predilections are oriented towards discovering the truth. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

You are wrong. 2nd degree murder, manslaughter, and aggravated assault are all included as "lesser included offenses" under the charge of first degree murder, and the jury is instructed to this effect. The DA does not have to file such charges, they are automatically included under the first degree murder charge, because all of the elements of those charges also are included in first degree murder. For example, 2nd degree murder consists of intentional murder, without the need to prove premeditation. Manslaughter consists of an action that could reasonably be expected to result in death, even if killing was not the specific intent of the action. First degree murder necessarily involves some action that could reasonably be expected to result in death (=manslaughter), done with an intent to kill (=2nd degree murder), and with the additional factor of premeditation (makes it 1st degree). If you are guilty of 1st degree murder, you have also met the criteria for 2nd degree and manslaughter. This is why the prosecution always charges the most serious crime they think they can prove. On the other hand, if the charge is 2nd degree murder the jury cannot consider 1st degree, even if they think it fits, because they can only go down the list to lesser charges. People with decent memories may recall that, during the reading of the Zimmerman verdict, he was found not guilty of manslaughter as well as 2nd degree murder. The alternative, of course, would be that the prosecution could charge someone with 1st degree murder, and if they were acquitted they could be retried for 2nd degree, and if still acquitted they could be charged with manslaughter, and on to aggravated assault, common assault, littering, and on and on. Not only would this be incredibly wasteful of court resources, it would effectively allow the prosecution many "bites at the apple", a violation of the spirit (but not the letter) of the law against double jeopardy. Had the jury found Dunn "not guilty" of first degree murder, they would have then had to consider 2nd degree, and on down the list (but not really for littering), and specifically stated "not guilty" until they hit "guilty" or exhausted the list. Since they did not reach a verdict on the 1st degree murder charge, they could not move on to consider the lesser included offenses. bakerjan, your information sources in this topic are as bad as your sources in the creation/evolution thread. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

From the story I read, it was a hung jury on the murder charge. The judge sent them back to deliberate on a lesser (2nd) charge, but they still came back "hung." So he wasn't acquitted on the murder charge, it was a mistrial. And the prosecutor plans on retrying it. I saw that too, but still don't get it. Second Degree = not premeditated, right? Is that not what this Guy did? How can Someone be convicted of attempted murder for firing on people, but not guilty for the one person he actually hit ?? Was an option of Manslaughter what was needed by the jury?I agree the verdict seems confusing. Maybe we can think of it this way, though. Imagine you get into an argument with one person, who is in a group with several other people who are just standing around. The person you are arguing with does something you interpret as a threat, so you shoot him. Can you also shoot at all the other people in the group "just in case", even if they have done nothing to threaten you? I'm curious to learn how many jurors were for and how many against conviction. The only contentious issue I can image at play would be the allegation that the kids had a gun and got rid of it. There was testimony that the kids drove off as Dunn was shooting at them, but never left the area and returned to the service station to get help within 2-3 minutes when they realized Davis had been shot. Not much time to drive around, find a dumpster, dump a shotgun no one else saw, and drive back to the gas station. The defense castigated the police for not immediately searching the area for a shotgun, but why would they have? No mention was made of the alleged shotgun (or pipe, or piece of licorice or whatever the hell else it was Dunn "thought" he saw) until days after the shooting, and the fault for that lies entirely with Dunn who fled the scene. Had he stuck around and made his case to the police immediately, they would have searched the area immediately. This case is yet another that makes me wonder what the hell is going on in people's heads. Imagine a situation where I am unarmed, standing in line to get movie tickets. Some guy tries to cut in line in front of me, and I object, and he gets belligerent and threatens me. Lets suppose I pull my cell phone out of my pocket to call 911, and the guy pulls a gun and starts shooting. What am I supposed to do (assuming he's a poor shot and hasn't hit me yet). If I stand there he'll kill me. If I run he'll claim my cell phone was a gun, and I must have ditched it when I ran. Either way I lose, so on balance I'd run, but it seems in Florida by running I'll absolve the guy of any legal responsibility for his actions. Is this the way it's supposed to work? Is this the intent of SYG? The guy with the gun always wins? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

This statement implies the commonly held assumption that economic efficiency is the only factor to be considered. Sometimes, though, it's not so simple as "what's good for Ford is good for the country". In the Slate article linked in the first post, it is alleged that Nixon introduced affirmative action programs to appease "Black activists". The sense I got was that "appeasing" was (in the author's opinion) a matter of political expediency and so the wrong thing to do. I think that oversimplifies the situation Nixon was faced with. Race riots and civil unrest were rampant at the time, and were a real threat to the country. People were (understandably, IMHO) tired of the systematic marginalization of a large segment of the population, based on nothing more than melanin and hair texture. Passing laws to allow people to vote and go to school is all well and good, but hardly sufficient when innumerable practices, built in to the system and working to inhibit economic advancement of those people, are allowed to persist. I think we have to ask if it is reasonable to expect people to participate in, or even accept, a system where the rules are obviously stacked against them. Imagine a sport where the opposing team starts with 10 points (0 for you), and they get three points for every goal but you get only one. Would you even bother to play? If you were forced to play, would you not protest the rules? Would you really play, or just go through the motions, since the outcome was dictated beforehand anyway? The government of the day was faced with some unenviable choices no private business has to consider. What is more damaging to the economy of the country, constant disruption from race riots and protests, or mandating that a (relatively small) portion of economic opportunities be set aside for minorities who have historically been denied those opportunities? Neither choice is great, but which is worse? How many Detroit or Watts riots would we have been willing to absorb to defend the historical economic advantage of white Americans? Just to be clear, as we have discussed in other affirmative action threads, I think the time for such programs has long passed. I also agree with the Slate article that continuing affirmative action programs has contributed to inaction on efforts that would make for long term beneficial changes. Educational opportunities for children (and adults) from poor families remain significantly worse than opportunities afforded other people. For example, schools are overwhelmingly funded by local property taxes. Schools in poor neighborhoods have little resources to draw on, as low property values ensure an inadequate tax base. The result is overcrowded classrooms, out of date textbooks, inability to retain the best teachers, crappy resources such as computers and libraries, and general lack of programs and activities (such as music and art) that make school more interesting (encouraging students to stay in school). In several states (including Georgia where I live) the courts have ruled that this funding mechanism is unconstitutional (at the State level) because the disparities it creates are so large. In almost every case the State legislature's response is to do nothing, or attempt to amend the state constitution. At the national level, Republicans in general and Tea Party types in particular wail against any expenditure of tax dollars to address the problem. The race history of the US is miserable, and many of the problems this history has spawned are so deeply entrenched they may never be eradicated, or take centuries to do so. Structural impediments built into society are now nominally directed along economic lines, but the history of race relations has ensured that there is a strong correlation between race and economic position. Black kids are no longer relegated by Jim Crow laws to marginal schools, but poor kids are, and poor kids are largely (though not exclusively) Black. Systematic marginalization, and our lock-em-all-up prison mentality, has fostered development of (IMHO) very destructive cultural trends in certain societal groups, including abandoning the need for fathers to be responsible for their kids, and outright disrespect for education. Destructive forces are now at play that would have been unimaginable at the time people were fighting for basic civil rights, but those forces also have their root in our failure as a society to really address institutionalized economic opportunity. Private business does not have to think about such matters (unless they choose to), but (I would argue) governments do. And they have, so far, failed spectacularly. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

this statement perfectly exposes the arrogance of the climate alarmistsHow so? Is the statement untrue? I think the statement is highly relevant to the "ignorance is bliss", "hold my beer and watch this" attitude of those who are willing to gamble with the planet's climate. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

The theory of evolution is about as settled as the theory of gravity (well, I'd say a bit more settled than gravity). Now, gravity is a scientific theory. The exact nature of what causes gravity is a matter of ongoing research. Is it distortion of space/time creating "gravity wells"? Is there such a thing as quantum gravity, with gravitons and gravity waves? What is the relationship of gravity to electromagnitism and the strong and weak nuclear forces? Do such ongoing questions cause us to suppose that gravity doesn't exist? Is it equally reasonable to suggest that gravity occurs due to angels pushing us down towards the Earth? Do angels also push the Moon along in it's orbit around the Earth? How would you suggest we could go about falsifying the "theory" that gravity occurs due to angels pushing things around? Would you jump without a parachute, to see if those angels would really push you to the ground and kill you? Wouldn't a merciful God call off His angels, allowing you to float to the ground safely? "Creation science" allows no testable hypotheses, as any possible outcome of any possible experiment could be manipulated by "God" to produce any outcome of His choosing. If "creation science" is true, and evolution false, I wish you would ask God to stop creating all those drug resistant pathogens. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I can see a scenario where small temperature changes could have a catastrophic effect. Large deposits of methane hydrates exist in the ocean at depths down to ~3,000m. Methane hydrate is a clathrate of water and methane, with the methane trapped in a lattice of water. This structure is very sensitive to pressure and temperature (see the stability curve here, just scroll down a bit). Warming of the deep ocean could easily "melt" these clathrates, starting with the ones at shallower depths, resulting in release of large amount of methane. Methane will displace oxygen from water, resulting in anoxic oceans with obvious bad consequences for any marine organisms that need oxygen. Methane will be released to the atmosphere, and as methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than C02 is, temperatures will rise, warming the deep ocean even more and resulting in release of even more methane in a positive feedback loop that might continue until all the methane currently locked in methane hydrate is released. There is pretty good evidence that release of methane in this manner contributed to the mass extinction event at the end of the Permian, which resulted in the extinction of >95% of all marine species, and >80% of terrestrial life forms. That event was most likely started by release of large amounts of C02 due to a supervolcano erupting through massive coal deposits in the Siberian Trapps. The effect of the C02 was magnified by the release of additional methane. The oceans became anoxic, and were dominated by sulfur-fixing bacteria, the kind that forms that black stinky scum in stagnant water. On land, not only were temperatures scorchingly hot, oxygen partial pressures fell to levels currently found ~15,000 feet (where we need to provide supplemental oxygen on planes). What concerns me is that we do not know where the threshold is to start this process. Methane hydrate stability is affected by pressure (=water depth) and temperature. Shallower deposits will release methane gas with less heating than deeper deposits, so there is no one water temperature we can confidently point to and say nothing will happen as long as we don't cross this line. Once the process starts, the huge heat capacity of the ocean will ensure that there will be no way to reverse the process. I think many people (I suspect including you, Jerry) make the mistake of thinking the effect of temperature on climate will always be linear, so incremental increases in temperature will only produce incremental changes in climate. The history of past climates suggests otherwise; non-linear processes (such as melting of methane hydrates) can produce radical changes in climate triggered by relatively small changes in temperature. Climate sensitivity to perturbation has (over geological time) been influenced by factors such as distribution of land masses; clumping of tectonic plates into supercontinents such as Pangea or Gondwana, or presence of land at the poles (as we have today) is associated with less stable climates. The speed of change is also important, as that will influence potentially stabilizing forces. For example, slow warming of the deep ocean could allow methane released from shallow hydrates to be trapped in new methane hydrates forming at deeper depths, with little net release. Fast warming could dump methane into the water/atmosphere faster than it can be redistributed to deeper deposits or consumed by methane-fixing bacteria. I think we are playing with a system we do not understand, but one that past history has shown to be capable of rapid jumps from one state to another as opposed to slow gradual change. I think that is very unwise. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I did you the courtesy of re-reading your post, and it still says that "deep-seated anger leads to physiological disease such as cancer". Note that "psychosomatic" does not mean "physiological", indeed it's pretty much the opposite. So once again, can you link to any published study in any medical journal that links anger to cancer? Now, I don't dispute that living in a constant state of anger is not a desirable state of affairs. I'll even concede that, for some people, turning to religion may help alleviate their anger. I think there is a pretty simple non-supernatural explanation for that, though. A lot of anger is about not being in control; people who need to be in charge, or think they are "special" (the best at their job, or some sport, for example) get angry when their authority or specialness is challenged. If you make yourself subservient to some big guy in the sky, you demote yourself from having to "win" all the time; whatever happens is part of "His" plan, a plan we mere humans can't begin to fathom. It really doesn't matter if the "big guy" exists or not, the trick is all in surrendering the need to "win". People who "go with the flow" tend to be a lot less stressed out than people who have to be in charge or on top all the time. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Well, those people are delusional. What is your approach to relieving deep seated anger?What is your evidence that anger causes cancer? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Amazing how fast this thread lurched off into left field. Ron's SHTF so often I suspect he has a wind tunnel installed in his toilet. The SLATE article is interesting, though much of what is presented as fact could just reflect the author's political opinion. Nevertheless, I can't disagree with the suggestion that investment in education would be a more productive route to accomplishing the goal of improving access to good jobs. Unfortunately, it seems conservatives these days, and to some extent libertarians, view quality public education the same way they view access to health care, a commodity that should be reserved for the most economically advantaged. I'm not optimistic at all that the political will exists to replace affirmative action with affirmative education for everyone. I think the single most destructive force on the "nuclear family" in the US has been the "war on drugs" and other manifestations of the lock-'em-all-up mentality so prevalent in conservative circles. The result has been a whole American subculture that has abandoned the notion of fathers as active participants in the family, as so many of them are locked up. Conservatives seem to have no issue with paying through the nose to maintain the prisonocracy, but complain bitterly about any expenditure of tax dollars for programs to divert people from criminal activity. Anyway, I'd say I agree with the major points of the article. Thanks for posting it. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Not long ago a substantial majority of Americans were quite willing to incinerate most of the world's population, and condemn the rest to a miserable death from radiation poisoning, over a choice of political system. "Better dead than red" and all that. Perhaps it was similar on the Soviet side. Fanatics of all stripes have always been ready and willing to put their religious or political priorities above everybody else. Committing mass murder in support of a twisted version of religion seems abhorrent to us, but we seem to be OK with it when our political or economic interests are challenged. Do we deliberately target innocent civilians? No. Neither do we expect our soldiers to commit suicide to accomplish their mission. But we are not as different from the jihadists as we like to think. If the US was occupied by a foreign power, I have little doubt but that there would be patriotic Americans who would be willing to do "whatever it takes" to fight back, including actions to "wake up" a complacent population. Timmothy McVeigh was not unique in his views, and some are sympathetic to his methods. We do ourselves a disservice, and put ourselves at risk, if we assume all Westerners (including Americans) are too "civilized" to resort to such tactics. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I disagree with the argument that our health care is expensive because we provide gold medal service to everyone on demand. We provide remarkably poor service to an astonishingly large fraction of the population, and pay more than anybody else for the privilege. We pay several times the "going rate" for each and every service, compared to every other developed country, due in large part to two factors: inelastic demand and a completely byzantine and opaque billing system that makes it impossible to comparison shop for anything but the most trivial medical procedure. If you have a condition that will kill you or ruin your ability to work/quality of life (or even worse if these apply to a loved one), you are in no position to bargain or negotiate anything. You have to pay whatever is demanded; this is inelastic demand. As an individual, you may be able to negotiate a price for an office visit or physical exam, but that rapidly becomes impossible for anything more complex. Every doctor who touches your file will bill you, and you have no control over that. Hospitals treat fees for supplies and services as trade secrets. Here's a small personal example. A while ago I had one of those "rites of passage" that come with getting older: a colonoscopy. I asked what my copay would be, and was told a figure that I thought was reasonable. What I was not told was that figure was only for the gastroenterologist, and I would also be getting a bill from the anesthesiologist and the clinic where the procedure was performed. Clearly the billing process is designed to break the bill into several parts, to make it difficult for the consumer to anticipate the total cost. How hard would it be to give a single figure that covers the gastroenterologist, the anesthesiologist, and the use of the clinic's facilities? On top of that, a small bit of tissue looked unusual and was excised for biopsy. I was billed a shocking amount for snipping the tissue, a one minute procedure, and billed separately for 2 stitches (over $300/stitch). Then I started receiving bills from pathologists. The sample got passed around to 3 of them, and of course they all sent me a bill. One of them billed me twice, with late fees added, after I had already paid his bill and had a cancelled check to prove it. At that point I had paid so many bills I almost paid those as well, before noticing they were from a pathologist I had already paid. In every one of these bills the "service" was listed as a number code, completely unintelligible to the consumer. Unless you spend a lot of time phoning, and dealing with ticked off people who treat you as if you are wasting there time, you just have to pay and pay and pay without knowing what you are paying for. Now, this example was of course a perfectly mundane and simple medical procedure. The point is, unless you work in medical billing or are a practicing physician, it is almost impossible to anticipate all the expenses, or even to understand what you are paying for. How much worse would it be for something really complicated, like cancer? I think the billing system is deliberately constructed to make it impossible for consumers to understand, much less negotiate in advance. When you combine a system where people require care (as in a serious medical condition) with a completely obscure billing system, you have a system set up for abuse. If you think the US system isn't rationed, you're living in cloud cuckoo land. It's absolutely rationed, based on ability to pay. The problem is, for the poor access is denied until their conditions become life threatening. At that point, when treatment is vastly more expensive than it was early in the disease, we allow them to seek treatment through the most expensive possible venue, hospital emergency rooms. We couldn't have designed a more expensive or stupid system if we had tried. The ACA has many provisions to try to bring down costs, as well as to make access affordable to more people. How well these will work I don't know; preventative care has potential over the long term, as long as people use it. Other carrot/stick measures aimed at hospitals seem to have the potential to encourage hospitals to avoid gravely ill patients and specialize in things like elective surgeries, so as to improve their "successful treatment" rates. Anyway I think things like transparency in costs would help a lot, by encouraging competition and allowing customers to shop around in the case of non-emergency procedures. We have talked about other things in the past, such as having insurance cover major costs (protection from financial catastrophe) and covering routine costs out of pocket. If costs came in line with world standards, insurance premiums would fall and there would be less requirement for subsidization. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Well, maybe we can repeal the ACA and EMTALA, and then use prexisting conditions to exclude them or just price insurance and health care so as to exclude all the part-timers (basically, apply the GOP/Libertarian plan), and hope a whole lot of them just go away to die quietly when they get sick. That's a win/win/win: we won't get stuck subsidizing their cancer therapy, they'll die earlier so we'll save on medicare and social security, and the unemployment numbers will look better. Plus that will make for shorter lines and wait times for the rest of us when we need to see the doctor. Yay! What's not to love? Or maybe we can ask how it is that civilized countries manage to ensure health care for virtually all their citizens, yet still outperform the US in terms of productivity and standard of living. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Don't you get splinters when you scrape yourself along the bottom of the barrel like that? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Absolutely in agreement. Everyone assumes innocent people would never sign a confession, but experience shows that it is surprisingly easy to get them to do so with a combination of threats and depriving people of sleep, food, water, and access to a bathroom. If you look at the exonerations achieved by the Innocence Project, you'll see a surprising number of false confessions, later proven to be completely false by DNA evidence, that were signed after 20-30 hours of non-stop interrogation without sleep, food, water, or being allowed to use the bathroom. People will sign anything to make the abuse stop, wrongly thinking they will be able to challenge the confession later. Recording everything would prevent such abuses. Plea bargains can be a useful tool, as the court system would collapse under the burden if every case had to go to trial. Unfortunately, the system lends itself to easy abuse. Even if you know you are innocent of a charge, imagine the dilemma if you don't have an ironclad alibi (you were home alone for example), you are facing life without parole if convicted, and you are offered a plea that would result in a five year sentence. In the case the OP linked, a 15-year-old kid insisted for hours of interrogation that he and his friend had nothing to do with the murders, but signed a confession when offered a much reduced sentence if he would just implicate his friend, and was threatened with life without parole if he refused. In addition, there should be national "best practices" standards for collecting eyewitness information, and photo and "in person" lineups. People in general, and it seems police in particular, assume that human memory is just like a photograph or audio recording, fixed and unchanging once acquired. A huge body of research proves that this is not true; we "rewrite" and update our memories, incorporating new information, every time we recall them. This is how learning works. As a result it is shockingly easy to unwittingly change a witnesses' memory, for example replacing a memory of a fleeting glimpse, or a memory acquired under extreme stress, with an image obtained from the photo lineup, or the actual lineup. Again referring to the Innocence Project, most of those people were convicted based on mistaken eyewitness testimony. It's shocking to read cases where the initial description of the suspect is a complete mismatch with the person picked out of the lineup, and cases where a very uncertain lineup ID turns into absolute certainty in the courtroom. It's likely that almost none of those victims were intentionally lying on the stand, rather their memory had been corrupted by common police practices. Twenty or thirty years ago much of this information was not available, so police were not being corrupt when they used techniques that were in common practice, techniques that were based on two "common sense" but false premises: innocent people will never sign a confession under any circumstances, and memories are fixed and unchanging. What I think is deplorable is that there is so much resistance to modifying practices to avoid preventable errors, now that we know how fragile memory can be and how easy it is to coerce a confession. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

AFAIK, the TB vaccine has never been approved for use in the US. I know there was/is a vaccine that was used in other countries. It's actually an issue for immigrants, as they will give a positive TB scratch test if they were vaccinated, and then they have to go through a lot to demonstrate they are not infected before they can be cleared for the visa or green card. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

On a couple of occasions I have changed my mind about something due to a logical argument or information that people have posted here. Not everyone always posts horse-pucky, though you always have to watch where you're stepping. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

If people believe that a vaccine that protects against a disease will encourage risky behavior, why do they not believe that God forgiving sins will just encourage people to be even worse sinners? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Been tied up at work. Thanks for your answer. I have to say, though, that I am not clear on your meaning. Are you suggesting that curiosity and intelligence are a "blessing", but only if the answer one arrives at is always in conformity with the Bible? Yet, it would seem that any rational examination of those points that can be critically evaluated lead to a different conclusion than the Biblical one. For example, many lines of evidence from geology, biology, physics, chemistry, and astronomy all point against the universe being created in 6 days around 6,000 BCE. The evidence that the universe is a bit older than 13 billion years, and that the Earth itself is about 4 1/2 billion years old, comes from many avenues of inquiry that are independent of each other, yet all lead to the same result. In fact the Bible is notoriously poor as a science text, as it gets so many things wrong (flat Earth, Earth as the center of the universe, etc). Biblical science is, on the other hand, a good representation of a human Bronze Age level of sophistication. Personally, I think the current scientific view of the world is a lot more interesting from a spiritual point of view. Most of the atoms in our body were formed inside stars, and were released and/or created there in massive supernovae billions of years before the Earth was formed. Every living thing on the Earth is related, members of the same family tree, its branches dividing over an unimaginably long (but still quite measurable) history. These ideas seem vastly more appealing to me than the notion of a rabbit-out-of-the-hat one off trick of literally modeling Adam out of a lump of clay, and yanking out a rib to make Eve. Now, the fact that virtually all of the science in the Bible is demonstrably incorrect does not logically prove that the Bible is also incorrect on those more important points that can't be tested scientifically, such as the existence or not of God. Still it seems to me that there is a problem. If, in order to be a good Christian (in the eyes of some but not all versions of the faith, including Paul Broun's) you have to believe in the literal truth of every word in the Bible, then you have to believe that the universe was made in such a way as to lure the curious into a trap, as any objective, rational, intelligent examination of questions like "how old is the world", "is the world flat or round", "where does rain come from", etc would lead you into conflict with the Bible. The only way to escape the trap is to be so uncurious as to never ask such questions, or so irrational as to choose untestable mythology over scientific observation and experiment. From that perspective curiosity and intelligence are a curse, as they can only lead to error. Where is the blessing? When I lived in Tucson, on my way to work I passed a church with the slogan "Happiness is submission to God" on the wall. That seems to me to reflect well the attitude of Paul Broun and those of his ilk: don't ask questions, don't be curious, don't reason, don't even think. Just submit mindlessly and all will be perfect. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

You shouldn't needle them like that. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)